Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Close

The applause for the admittedly spectacular explosion seemed a bit cold hearted though. I was also a little concerned that they ran out excitedly to grab the falling debris, seemingly without thinking that there might be lots of other debris still falling.

Re: 1170 blocked exit points, any blocked entry points ?

"twinkie"

I can fully understand that they'd ban the naming of something after a chemical weapon masquerading as food.

Re: "We will appeal this decision"

Is it a right to appeal or a right to request an appeal? ISTR reading once upon a time that an appeal must have some justification such as a material point of law or new evidence not apparent at the original trial. ie there must be grounds for an appeal to be granted, otherwise it may be refused. Also, IIRC, new evidence must be new and newly discovered, and not evidence held back from the original trial simply to have ammunition for a new trial (as seems to be common in big cases in the US)

IANAL and all of the above may well be incorrect, hence the initial question.

Re: Gifting

"I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas"

You may change your mind after seeing one having a dump. They don't just shit like a cow (ie almost a liquid), they also spin their tail like a propeller and spread it far and wide! I suppose if you are an arable farmer or have a large allotment, it might work well as an autonomous muck spreader.

Re: This is a no-win for China

Well, the warning signs have been visible for years. This is just one m ore of many. It's the way Chinese law works. If you as a foreigner want to set up shop in China, you need a local "sponsor" who will own 51% of your Chinese operation and have total access to any and all IP used in said business. That's been the case for decades and anyone setting up there knows that up front. Sadly, the rush for cheap labour and short term profits has blinded many to the long term problems. But once a few did it, everyone else pretty much had to do the same or see their market share eaten for lunch by those who did it first. Other cheap labour countries with less onerous ownership laws are and were available, but China has the money to invest in new plant and subsidies that other countries simply couldn't beat. Things are changing, but China is still reaping the harvest of decades of outsourcing production and has created it's own production and market.

Re: designed to operate even if the host spacecraft is inactive

"So how exactly does the host spacecraft command it to deploy, if the host spacecraft is inactive? Perhaps and automatic failsafe if it doesn't receive heartbeat from the spacecraft for more than some arbitrary period, but that carries its own risk of failure and prematurely deorbiting a working bird."

This initial iteration, the prototype, is designed to help speed up the return and burn up of used launch vehicles, so deployment at a set time or under set conditions very early in its life is the expected action. Later iterations for use on satellites will no doubt have other conditions which must be met before it deploys. Possibly a separate and independent receiver solely for receiving the deployment signal.

I suspect the answer will be a bit of materials science and thicker materials. The ISS was built when getting anything big and heavy into space was really, really expensive so those walls are pretty thin skin. With newer, cheaper and big launch vehicles, and a needed for those thicker (heavier!) walls, it should be less of an issue to put something up there with a known and much longer lifespan. The data from the long term exposure of the existing ISS materials will, of course, be very useful. I'd expect that when the last astronaut leaves, it won't just be a case of turning out the lights, but bringing back samples cut from the outside of the station before de-orbiting the remains.

Re: "why it was collecting location coordinates down to six decimal places"

Well, to be fair, although they probably neither needed nor should have had that level of co-ordinate data, once the data had been stolen with full address and postcode, pretty much anyone could have correlated that data with mapping data. Having the coordinates just made it easier and quicker.

Re: DTN =~ UUCP?

I was thinking more along the lines of NNTP or FidoNet :-)

Re: 13 or X3

I suspect they will chicken out. There seems to be higher levels of superstition in the US than one might expect. At least, C-Level think that's the case. Floor 13, room 13 etc are often "missing" in buildings and streets.

ISTR Otis once reported that 85% of hotels have no floor designated 13 on the lift buttons/menu. There seems to be a fear that guests might refuse a booked room on a floor labelled 13, even though they will actually take a room on the 13th floor if it's labelled as 14 instead. Whether that is true of the actual guests is another matter of course.

Re: Nice recovery

"The camera handling person was confused for a moment, judging from the wide angle shot trying to find the thing."

Yeah, I saw that too. Load sounds of launch, lots of steam and exhaust and the camera operator, for a fraction of a second, seemed to think s/he had missed it and panned up before realising, no, it's not up there yet :-)

Re: Is it such a big problem in this case?

That's an interesting description of what some people do. But these drives max out at 2500MB/s write speed so I'd guess the people you are talking about are going to be using something a bit more beefy like full on enterprise grade kit writing into a large array and will be testing and benchmarking and carefully checking the specs of the kit they are using or planning to use. Would someone writing 64GB/s continuously for days or weeks really be using 1TB NVMe drives? I just can't imagine that amount of data or begin to conceive of the costs involved, it's just so far outside of my experience.

would that be a soft loan from a bank?

Re: Why a Basset Hound?

The Basset Hound is often seen, especially in cartoons, as being a detective because the big floppy ears are reminiscent of the Deerstalker supposedly worn by Sherlock Holmes.

This one, the D915GHA

From that spec, it seems the two different NIC options were factory build options. I don't recall that at the time, nor any difference in model numbers. I suspect what happened is they found most people wanted the Gb Marvel NIC rather than the 10/100 Intel NIC and simply abandoned the 10/100 Intel option in favour of the Marvel Gb option.